Posts Tagged ‘1967 Riot 50th Anniversary’

By Bill McGraw | Bridge Magazine While Detroit has seen positive changes in the police department and the inclusion of African Americans in civic life since 1967, the decline of manufacturing and flight of people over the past five decades have contributed to significantly higher levels of unemployment and impoverished residents in the city. Reynolds…

By Bill McGraw | Bridge Magazine Was it a riot or a rebellion? Or both? Nearly five decades after the last fire was extinguished, the discussion continues over what to call the events in Detroit during July 1967. The word “riot” – often spoken or written in the plural, as “the Detroit riots” – remains…

By Ali Harb | The Arab American News, for New Michigan Media DETROIT – Arab American business owners pride themselves on staying in Detroit when others left. They argue that they have weathered the storm and stuck with the city during its decline, so they want to be a part of its future as it…

By Bill McGraw | Bridge Magazine DATES Sunday, July 23 through Thursday, July 27 BY THE NUMBERS Deaths: 43 (10 whites and 33 African Americans, most at the hands of law enforcement) Injuries: 1,189 Damage: The official total was put at between $287 million and $323 million, in 2016 dollars, but that did not include…

By WDET Programming Staff As part of the Detroit Journalism Cooperative project “The Intersection,” WDET’s Sandra Svoboda hosted a conversation on Detroit Today about how the events of 1967 affected the Arab-American community in and around the city, and how the power and dynamics of that community have changed since that summer. Complicating the local…

America still struggles with race, but those struggles are changing. As the white majority has been shrinking, tensions have been rising. You can see it in anti-immigration movements. In the feeling among some white people they’re being oppressed. Meanwhile, a new generation of black protest organizations has been taking to the streets as black Americans…

News media around the world are talking about Detroit’s resurgence. Politicians in the city and the state, such as Governor Rick Snyder, hype its revitalization. “New investments have helped fuel a rapid dramatic transformation of Detroit and today it’s America’s comeback city.” But that’s only part of the story of Detroit. In the city’s neighborhoods…

On Saturday, July 22, 1967, Detroit found itself in the middle of an oppressive heat wave. In popular culture, Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” topped the R&B charts and “The Dirty Dozen” was No. 1 at the box office. That year, the Motor City produced the Ford Mustang, Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac GTO and the Detroit Tigers…

DETROIT – Stately, stout Charles Williams II takes the microphone in an old church auditorium on Detroit’s west side and convenes the Saturday rally with a familiar war cry. “NO JUSTICE!” Rev. Williams shouts, stopping conversations and focusing attention on the front of a smallish room. “NO PEACE!” yell back some 65 people. The rally…

Even as smoke drifted over thousands of charred homes and buildings after days of deadly insurrection and looting in Detroit, President Lyndon B. Johnson called upon experts to determine the root cause of racial disorders that swept scores of U.S. cities in the summer of 1967. Those experts, sitting on what came to be known…